(A fun sample)

It isn’t my fault.  It really isn’t!  Somebody must have set me up to get me into trouble.

Those goats were locked in.  I am telling the truth.  I closed both slide bars on the bottom door.   I even shut the top door on their pen and put the industrial-strength hook through the extra-strong steel eye before I left.  There is no way they could have gotten out on their own.

Aunt Liz is yelling at me so loud I can’t get a word in to defend myself.

My cousin Josh is sitting in the corner right now snickering behind his hand   Maybe he did it,   maybe not.  I can’t just go around accusing people of letting out the goats that trampled my aunt’s garden, knocked over the clothesline and ate her new spring coat (which was hanging on that clothesline).   I have no proof of anything.

I hate saying this but here goes.  My name is Ben and I am ten.  I knew you would laugh.  I am used to it.  But I didn’t name me and I can’t help it if I am ten.  I just am.   Next year will be better.

I came to live with my Aunt Liz and Uncle Joe about a year ago now.  My dad died when I was four years old and my mom got sick last year and just couldn’t take care of me anymore.  Don’t feel sad for me, though, because I love living here on the farm with my aunt and uncle and cousins, Joshua, Jonah, Jessica and Jewel.  Oh yeah, I almost forgot the baby.  Her name is Janey.  If you think that’s a lot of “J” names then let me also tell you that their last name is Jacks.  If I get angry with any of them, their names are real satisfying to say together in a grouchy, mean voice.

I am starting to get used to living on a farm and I get along pretty good with my cousins now that they have stopped pranking me.  The first few months were brutal.  My least favourite was when Josh and Jonah put the frog under my pillow the first week I was here.  Just after I went to sleep, that frog jumped out onto my face and croaked his little heart out.  I was so scared I ran right outside, tripped over the sleeping dog, stumbled into the tire swing, fell down the garden step and rolled down the hill into the creek.  I was sitting in the middle of the creek, all wet and chattering with cold while the two boys stood on the top of the bank laughing at me.

After that, the night they saran wrapped me to my bed didn’t feel like such an awful thing.  Jess helped me unwrap when I told her she could play with my IPod.  She is only seven so she was happy to listen to a couple of songs and then she gave it back to me.

Josh is ten like me and Jonah is nine.  We’ve become pretty good friends since they realized that I am here to stay and I’m not mean or stupid or a tattletale.  Jessica likes me because I always stick up for her.  Jewel is only three and can be a big pain sometimes when she tries to follow us around but usually she is just cute.  Janey is a baby, just six months old so she still hangs around Aunt Liz a lot.

I need to get back to my problem with the loose goats.

I know I locked those beastly, obnoxious animals up and I honestly don’t think my cousin had anything to do with them getting loose even though he is laughing.

I have to admit seeing Gertie with a pink coat sleeve stuck on her horn and Gretta with clothesline and pink fabric wrapped around her back leg does look kind of funny.   It’s not funny to Aunt Liz though.    She is missing the new coat that she spent hours every night for two weeks sewing up.   She is not too upset about the garden because nothing is really growing in it yet.

The goats are my responsibility to feed and take care of after school and on weekends so it is only natural for me to be the one in trouble.  When they escaped in the past they never ate anybody’s coat.  They did chew up some diapers once but Aunt Liz seems to have lots of those.

The other people on the farm are Gordie the handyman and Cousin Albert, Aunt Liz’s relative, who takes care of feeding and milking the 400 cows every day.  There’s Great-Grandpa John Jacks, too, but he is ninety-five and doesn’t come outside unless somebody brings him.

I can’t think of any reason why Gordie would try to get me in trouble.  Josh, Jonah and I really like him and help him every chance we can get.  Gordie knows everything about any kind of farming and he knows lots of good stories, too. Besides that, we never tell Aunt Liz on him when he sneaks a few of her flowers to take to his girlfriend, Anna, who lives on the next farm up the road on the right

That only leaves Cousin Albert who is a little peculiar but he is not mean so I don’t think he let the goats out.

I am stumped.

I can see the goat pen from here and everything looks quite normal.  There are no goat-tooth marks on the open top doors or goat-kick splinters on the bottom doors.  It seems like the goats did not let themselves out like they have in the past before Uncle Joe reinforced their pen on the inside with sheets of tin and stopped those crazy critters from eating their home!   Come to think of it where is Uncle Joe anyway?  I haven’t seen him since supper.  He jumped up from the table after reading the Farmer’s Life newspaper, said he would be in the barn and left in a hurry.

Aunt Liz has stopped yelling at me now.  The last thing I heard her say was something about no internet access or TV watching for 2 weeks.  That hurts.  I am even getting sympathetic looks from Jonah who came in the shed to hear what all the noise was about.  I really need to solve this goat break-out and fast. 

Here comes Uncle Joe with the wheelbarrow filled with a bunch of tools and wood.  He is looking kind of sheepish.

Wow! I can’t believe it.  He is apologizing to Aunt Liz for letting the goats out.  If she doesn’t close her mouth it will soon be full of flies.

Here’s the scoop.  It seems Uncle Joe read in Farmer’s Life that the kind of wood he used to make the feed boxes for the goats yesterday is toxic and it could make them really sick if they chew on it.  (There is no question of that since goats chew on everything).  He let the goats loose so they wouldn’t chew on the boxes.  He didn’t think they could get into much trouble in the five minutes it would take to get the supplies to build new ones.   Boy was he wrong!   It took him fifteen minutes just to find the wheelbarrow.  When he was just about at the shed he heard a lot of yelling.  Right now he is agreeing with Aunt Liz that he will need to buy her a new coat and maybe a new pair of shoes to go with it.

They are both apologizing to me now and that will be the end of it.  Nobody around here holds any grudges.   The story might show up on the humour page of Farmer’s Life newspaper though.   It is kind of funny, don’t you think?